Ingres drawing in his painting

OK, lets see if I can tie this thing up. Above is a portrait, in oil this time, by Ingres. Lets note the similarity in the painting to the drawings I have been showing you for the last few days. Here is the head from that portrait below.

Below is the head I posted the other night still wearing its ovoid delineation explanatory line. As you can see the same technologies I have been discussing the last few days are in the head above in paint. The values are suppressed and the painting is a creation primarily of line and not of mass. Ingres painting is a colored drawing. There is more modeling in the painting than in his pure line drawing, but there is still a dominance of line over shading. The sinuous line that defines the forms is superior to the modeling. It is particularly obvious in the hand above.

Ingres has continued the strategies of expressing his form through other methods than modeling. The ribbon like hair above and in the painted portrait express the curvature of the skull, for instance. Notice how the lips are wrapped around the face showing how the forms turn there.

There is no clutter in the lights, and there are no obvious brushstrokes to clutter up his forms. Everything is refined down to clear ovoid shapes. It is an austere refined beauty. It is classical. We are so accustomed to the romantic bold and bravura handling today, most of the artists we revere and who appear in the pages of our contemporary art magazines are romantic, but there is another approach. The crystalline perfection of these formal paintings is irreproachable and they have a purity of vision that can influence our paintings today.